Hot Bodies Boxed Set: The Complete Vital Signs Erotic Romance Trilogy (46 page)

Harlan could feel his orgasm lying just out of reach. He could smell the musk of his arousal, could taste the salt of his sweat as it formed on his jaw, could feel his essence building up in the tangle of his balls. But try as he might, he just wouldn’t blow.

Harlan just couldn’t do this by himself. He wasn’t a teenage boy anymore—he was a grown man. If he was going to come, he needed a woman.

Or if not a woman, at least a reasonable substitute.

He eyed the shower stall in the far corner of the room. He’d never used it, but he knew the cleaning woman assigned to maintaining his private washroom always kept it well-stocked with fresh linens and toiletries. He opened the shower stall door and saw a wall-mounted dispenser of liquid soap, along with a stack of clean towels and washcloths.

Excellent. Those would do nicely.

He stripped naked and left his scrubs and boxer shorts in a neat pile on a nearby chair. He selected a clean towel from the stack and hung it on the heated towel bar, then selected a couple of the thick terry washcloths, inspecting their weave and heft. They were thick and somewhat rough, but not too rough to do the job. Nice.

He turned on the taps, set the water temperature to the hottest level he could stand. He stepped under the stream, soaked the two washcloths until they were sopping wet. Then he soaped them up with the liquid soap from the dispenser, until they were heavy and slick with lather. Then he formed them into a tube of sorts, and wrapped the tube around his cock.

Ahh. Now that was just what the doctor ordered.

The combination of the thick cotton cloth, the hot water, and the slick soap lather wasn’t exactly a woman, but it would do in a pinch. The minute his cock slid inside, Harlan was in heaven.

He braced himself against the wall with one hand, and used the other to hold the makeshift pussy around his cock while he fucked it.

He didn’t have to fuck it for long. At last, the orgasm he’d so desperately needed arrived, and his seed spilled on the Art Deco tiles, soon to be washed away by the steamy hot water.

Harlan leaned against the shower stall wall, gasping for breath. He was exhausted. The orgasm certainly wasn’t the best he’d ever had, but it would sustain him for the time being. It took the edge off, at least. Enough that he wasn’t thinking about Starla Berring naked anymore.

He glanced at the wall clock, saw that he had about an hour before he was needed back in the OR. He stepped out of the shower, dried off, and collapsed naked onto the cot pushed up against the washroom retreat’s far wall. He was asleep even before his head hit the hospital-issued pillow.

Eleven

Maryam Malone sat in her office, her head spinning. It had been one helluva day at Covington Community Hospital. Four dead patients (and two in critical condition) thanks to an IV bag mix-up. A fired contract nurse, and a hysterical nurse-anesthetist who had just gone home in tears over it. Her head surgical nurse was pregnant—knocked flat from severe morning sickness and exhaustion—and therefore out of commission. Between that and the fact her head surgical nurse’s chief-of-surgery husband hadn’t shown up for OR duty at all, Maryam had to cancel all elective surgeries for the rest of the week.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, after a frantic search, a pair of orderlies had just found Dr. Harlan Wilkinson naked and unconscious in his private office.

And Maryam had just been assigned to go wake him up.

“Why me, Lord?” Maryam said aloud. “I think it’s high time for me to retire.”

The nurse pulled open a supply drawer in her huge desk and took out a batch of smelling salts, a blood-pressure cuff, and some premoistened washcloths. She headed down the hallway toward the elevators, stopping off in the linen-supply room for a couple of hospital gowns. As much as she’d wondered what the handsome and fit Dr. Harlan Wilkinson looked like naked, she decided now probably wasn’t a good time to find out.

It was a long walk from the main patient-care wing to the Old Wards wing on the opposite end of the hospital campus. Harlan’s private office was tucked away there among narrow, dusty hallways that still smelled faintly of cigarette smoke—a relic of a time not so long ago when doctors did cigarette ads in magazines and the hospital intake clerks asked incoming patients if they wanted smoking or non-smoking rooms.

Maryam had been a chain smoker for twenty-five years, and had only quit when the hospital banned all smoking on hospital premises—even in break rooms and the parking garage—ten years earlier. Though it had been ten years since she’d had a drag, she always craved one of her beloved old unfiltered Luckies whenever she took a stroll through the Old Wards.

With the day Maryam was having, she just might be forced to dig up a pack of Luckies from someplace and smoke the entire thing.

After almost ten minutes of walking, she finally made it to the tiny hall nook that led to Harlan’s Old Wards office. The pair of orderlies that had found him there stood just outside his office door, both sipping cans of Diet Coke and snickering.

Maryam stopped short in front of them, placed her gnarled hands on her hips. “What’s so goddamn funny?”

Both orderlies instantly clapped their mouths shut. Maryam might be four-foot-eleven, ancient, and humpbacked—but she was still plenty intimidating. “We, uhhh, we found him,” one of them mumbled. His face was oily and pockmarked with pimples; Maryam figured he couldn’t be more than twenty. “He’s, uhhh, naked.”

“I know, sonny. That’s what you said on the phone.”

The other orderly—a tubby kid of eighteen or nineteen who was already balding, resumed snickering. “He’s naked,” he said in thick fratboy-speak. “And he’s got wood.”

Maryam swore under her breath and shoved her way past Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Sure enough, she found Dr. Harlan Wilkinson sprawled out naked and unconscious on the tiny cot stashed against the far wall of his private washroom-slash-lounge, his huge erect cock pointing due north.

Maryam held up the two hospital gowns she’d brought along, fully intending to toss them over Dr. Harlan Wilkinson’s aroused body. But somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Not just yet, anyway.

Covington Community Hospital’s handsome, fit, dashing—if a complete and total asshole—Chief of Surgery lay before her naked, aroused, and unconscious. When would she have another opportunity like this? She might as well admire the goddamn scenery.

Maryam inched closer to the out-cold surgeon, until she was almost close enough to touch him. She could certainly
smell
him. Maryam might not have much of a sex life these days, but she’d been around the block enough times to know what sex smelled like. And Maryam’s nose told her that Harlan had got his rocks off in that tiny tiled room very recently, and in a very big way.

But with whom? Not his wife Joanna, surely—she was still attached to an IV pole in the emergency department. And Harlan Wilkinson, MD didn’t exactly strike her as the type who would play Rosie Palmer And Her Five Sisters on the job. That left only left one possibility in Maryam’s mind.

Starla Berring?

“Damn, girl, but you sure work fast,” Maryam clucked aloud as she rummaged in her scrub pocket for the smelling salts. “Not to mention knock ‘em dead. I’ll have to put you in for a raise later this year.”

With that, Maryam tossed the two hospital gowns over Dr. Harlan Wilkinson’s naked, sweaty body. The one that landed over his cock looked like the Big Top for Ringling Bros. She placed one of the cold premoistened towelettes onto Harlan’s forehead and held the smelling salts out under his nose until he began to stir.

After a moment or two, Harlan’s eyes fluttered open, and he sat bolt upright. He stared at Maryam, went white as a sheet, then red-faced with pure embarrassment. “Wha?”

“Boy howdy, have you got some explaining to do,” Maryam clucked at him as she wrapped the blood-pressure cuff around his forearm. “An’ not just to me.”

****

Starla Berring just didn’t get it. She’d just finished throwing herself at Dr. Harlan Wilkinson in postop. She’d even flashed him a little boob. She knew it had turned him on, too—he’d bolted out of postop with the biggest hard-on this side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And yet, he’d totally ignored her.

Nobody ignored Starla Berring. Not where sex was concerned, anyway. Starla had never met a man she couldn’t screw, and she didn’t intend to start now. She had to find a way to get her mojo back.

Under normal circumstances, Starla would just head back to her most recent conquest for a quickie in order to recharge her batteries. But her most recent conquest was Billy Hartzell, and word around the ward was that he’d managed to help kill a bunch of old geezers in Geriatrics when he mixed up some IV bags. What a dumbass. He’d been fired for it—of course—and he’d lit out of town faster than a drunken polecat.

So much for Plan B.

Twelve

Billy Hartzell drove his battered pickup west on Interstate 40, heading towards Nashville. He was doing almost double the speed limit, but he didn’t care. He needed to put as much space between himself and Statesville, North Carolina as he possibly could.

Why? He’d killed five people, for starters. Not directly, of course. Not intentionally. All he’d done was grab some oversized IV bags off a dusty shelf, and people had died because of it.

Talk about some shitty luck.

Billy felt sick. He felt filthy. He almost wanted to die himself. Not so much because of what had happened on the Geriatrics ward, but because of what Dana would think about him now.

Like it or not, whether he’d meant it or not, Billy Hartzell had blood on his hands. He was a killer, and Dana would surely hate him for it forever. He wouldn’t be charged with anything criminal since it was an honest mistake—and there was plenty of blame to go around; he was just the fall guy. But that still didn’t change things. He’d have this on his conscience for the rest of his life.

Billy figured his nursing career would begin and end with his crummy short-term nursing contract at Covington Community Hospital. He’d been a working professional nurse for a grand total of two weeks, and his one little screwup had managed to kill five people. For a short-term nursing contract that mostly involved emptying bedpans, that had to be some kind of record—something that nursing professors would talk about in lectures and textbooks for decades to come.

It would haunt him for the rest of his career, the rest of his life—hell, maybe even into his
next
life. It went without saying that he’d probably never work as a nurse ever again. Hell, he might not work
anywhere
ever again. With his current set of references, he’d be lucky to get a job flipping burgers.

Billy was unemployed, incompetent, and a borderline murderer. Things could not possibly be any worse.

Except they were.

The love of Billy’s life was back in Statesville, and Billy had lost her forever.

Billy might only have known Dana for a day, but he felt like he’d known her since before he was born. He’d heard stories about love at first sight, destiny, the notion that God created one person for you to love forever and arranged it for you even before your soul is formed in the womb.

Before yesterday, Billy had thought those stories were just silly fairy tales. But now he knew they were true.

Billy had no idea where he would go. He had no idea what he would do. At this point, he wasn’t even sure how long he’d survive.

****

Dana Johnson sat up to her neck in suds in her bathtub, crying her eyes out. Today was the worst day of her life.

A bunch of people had died at the hospital today. People died at hospitals every day, but today was different. None of those people
had
to die—at least, not today. It had all been a big mistake. Dana had tried to help save one of them, an eighty-nine-year-old woman who had overdosed on morphine. By the time she’d gotten to the poor woman’s room, she was already well beyond help. All Dana could do was stand back and watch as the duty nurse stopped bagging the ventilator and the attending physician verbally declared the time of death.

In all her years as a nurse, Dana had never watched a patient die before. She was a nurse-anesthetist who worked in operating rooms putting mostly healthy people under anesthesia. The high-risk cases were always assigned to anesthesiologists, MDs. It was clean, simple, mostly low-risk work. She’d never really worked in the trenches, not even in nursing school. Back in college, her ER rotation had consisted mostly of removing splinters and helping set broken bones. No heart attacks, no car accidents, no messy, gruesome, senseless death. Today had been her first time.

In a way, it was almost as if she’d lost her virginity—but not in a joyful, coming-of-age sense. More like in a soiled, loss-of-innocence sense.

Which brought her to the main reason she was so distraught.

The hospital administration had blamed Billy Hartzell for the deaths, had fired him, and had run him out of town on a rail. They’d all but tarred-and-feathered him. Dana had even overheard one of the senior nurses whispering that Billy was lucky he wasn’t in jail.

Dana knew in her heart that Billy hadn’t done anything wrong. She might not know all the details, but she knew whatever had happened, it was an honest mistake, something that could—and did—happen to anyone. Dana couldn’t count the number of times she’d seen nurses—and even doctors—make careless mistakes that had hurt patients. She knew that plenty of patients even died when medicines were switched, wounds got needlessly infected, when doctors and nurses couldn’t be bothered to make their duty rounds in a timely fashion. But it usually got swept under the rug, because it was usually just too hard to determine who or what was really responsible. It was usually a perfect storm of multiple things, none of which were ever attributable to just one person. Or even if it was, that one person had powerful friends who covered his ass.

The same was probably true today. For whatever reason, Billy had been the one to take the fall for someone else’s mistake. Today had been a special case. A special case that had ended a lot of lives. Including her own.

Billy was gone. Nobody knew where he was. And nobody cared—except her. Dana feared she would never see him again.

And if Dana never saw Billy again, she wasn’t sure that life was worth living at all.

She’d never felt pain like this. It was agony, a torture to end all tortures. Billy was her soulmate. She didn’t know much else about him, but she knew that much to be true. She’d known it from the minute she’d laid eyes on him that he belonged to her, and she to him. In the very brief time they’d known each other, they’d barely touched—barely even talked. And yet, Dana was tethered to him with an invisible silken cord. The brief joy she’d experienced in his presence was replaced with something that felt like death itself.

Dana squeezed her eyes shut, sank down even lower in the suds, and began to sob. She sobbed until her chest and throat ached, until she thought her whole body was going to split apart.

With Billy gone, Dana felt her life was over before it had even begun. She was still a twenty-six-year-old virgin. She was still all alone in the world. And now she might never have another chance to be with the man that she knew in her heart was the love of her life.

A part of Dana wanted to get up out of that tub and drive off into the night in search of him. But another part of her—by far the largest part of her—just wanted to crawl into a deep, dark hole and die. Dana had never been the type to take crazy risks, after all. She was far too prim, proper, reserved—and damaged—for that. Confrontation had never been one of her strong suits—at least not since dirty old Captain Masters had manhandled her all those years ago. Maybe she and Billy just weren’t meant to be. Maybe Dana Johnson was destined to die a virgin old maid. Maybe she just wasn’t meant to be happy, ever.

Or maybe not.

Dana gritted her teeth and tightened her fists deep under the hot sudsy water. With the last ounce of her will, she dragged herself up and out of the tub and marched down the hallway naked. She didn’t bother to dry off; steamy water fell off her body in sheets and soaked the carpet underneath her feet. She grabbed her bathrobe off the back of her bedroom door and put it on.

Dana glanced at the clock and saw it was already well past eleven. A thunderstorm raged outside, with thunderclaps rattling the windowpanes and heavy rain pounding down hard on the low roof of Dana’s small bungalow. She was due back in to work at seven the next morning. It hardly seemed the ideal time for her to go traipsing off across the Blue Ridge Mountains in search of her lost love. She wasn’t even sure which direction Billy had headed—and whichever way he went, he was long gone by now. The mountain roads were treacherous during heavy rains, especially at night. What would be the point of chasing Billy across the state when she might drive off a cliff and die?

No, chasing Billy down just wasn’t an option right now. But Dana wasn’t about to let him go that easily. The old Dana Johnson might have given up and just let him slip through her fingers, but this was the new Dana Johnson. The new Dana Johnson wasn’t going to let Billy get away.

At this point Dana had no idea how she would manage to reunite with the love of her life. But she knew that she would. Somehow, someday. It was just a question of when.

In the meantime, Dana knew that she had a lot more work to do when it came to becoming the New and Improved Dana Johnson. She needed to conquer her fears, to become less timid and more outgoing. She needed to be strong in the presence of men, and to become comfortable with her sexuality for the first time in her life. And she didn’t just need to be strong—she needed to be brave.

In short, she needed to finally grow up.

The next morning, when Dana reported for duty in Dr. Marx’s lockdown Psychiatric Unit, she would begin the first step in her journey.